In 1970, Rick Loomis placed an ad in Avalon Hill’s The General offering to moderate a game called Nuclear Destruction by mail.

That sounds small now.

It was not small.

He was a U.S. Army specialist stationed at Fort Shafter in Hawaii. He had a nuclear-war game, a postal address, and a willingness to do the boring work that makes distant play possible. Players mailed in orders. Loomis processed them. Results went back out through the mail.

Then the player count grew.

The paperwork got heavy enough that fellow soldier Steve MacGregor helped create a computer program to process turns. Loomis eventually built Flying Buffalo around that idea: multiplayer strategy games played at a distance, adjudicated by a neutral system, delivered through the mail.

The details sound primitive because they were primitive. Mainframe time. Early business computers. Paper records. Turn sheets. Postal delays. Waiting days or weeks to see whether your plan worked.

But the design breakthrough is clear.

Loomis treated access as a design problem.

What if the players did not live near one another?

What if the game needed hidden information and a neutral referee?

What if a computer could handle the parts that made human moderation slow, inconsistent, or impossible at scale?

That was the plumbing.

Not the glamorous part of game design. The necessary part.

Three Ways To Open The Door

Loomis’s design career produced three major format moves. Each one answered the same question: how do you let people play who otherwise cannot?

The first was computer-moderated play-by-mail gaming.

Diplomacy had already been played by mail. Human moderators already existed. Loomis’s contribution was to make the moderation systematic, repeatable, and scalable. A computer could process hidden orders, generate individual turn reports, and support multiplayer strategy at a size and consistency that hand moderation struggled to match.

That did not just create a game.

It created a business category.

Flying Buffalo became the best-known early play-by-mail company, and for a time one of the only companies doing it at meaningful scale. Other companies followed. Some were directly inspired by Loomis’s work. By the 1980s, play-by-mail had become a recognizable hobby with its own magazines, awards, conventions, and design vocabulary.

The second was the solitaire RPG adventure.

Buffalo Castle, published in 1976 for Tunnels & Trolls, let one player have a role-playing experience alone. No referee. No group. No scheduling problem. Just a character, a rulebook, and a branching adventure.

That mattered because early role-playing games assumed a group. If you did not have a group, you were locked out. Buffalo Castle opened a side door. It did not replace the table. It gave stranded players a way in.

The third was system-neutral RPG support.

Grimtooth’s Traps, first published in 1981, presented traps as portable game-master material rather than rules locked to one system. The CityBook line pushed a related idea: a supplement could serve many games if it focused on usable content instead of proprietary mechanics.

Today that feels normal.

It was not always normal.

The idea that an RPG book could be useful because it gave you situations, locations, threats, and tools instead of system-specific numbers is now everywhere. Loomis helped prove there was a market for that.

These were format innovations more than mechanical innovations.

He was not trying to invent a new dice mechanic.

He was inventing new ways to reach the table.

STARWEB

Starweb is where Loomis’s format work becomes a full design achievement.

Launched in 1976, Starweb is a large multiplayer space strategy game built for play by mail and computer moderation. Players explore, conquer, negotiate, betray, trade, and fight across a shared map they cannot fully see.

The key design move is asymmetry.

Different player roles chase victory in different ways. An Empire Builder wants control. A Merchant wants wealth. A Pirate wants to raid. A Berserker wants destruction. Other roles pull the game in other directions.

That simple decision creates social voltage.

Players are not merely competing for the same prize. They are trying to define what the game is about while other people define it differently. One player’s profitable trade network may be another player’s target list. One player’s peaceful expansion may sit directly in the path of someone who benefits when worlds burn.

Starweb is a diplomacy engine disguised as a space game.

That is why it lasted.

The rules did not need constant novelty. The players supplied novelty through incomplete information, private negotiation, shifting alliances, and incompatible goals. The computer handled the hidden state. The mail gave the game time to ferment. A turn was not just a result. It was an event.

Starweb won major play-by-mail awards, appeared on important game lists, and remained active for decades. Variants appeared over time, including slower formats, email formats, anonymous games, and team forms of play.

That durability matters.

Many games are clever once.

Starweb kept working.

The Publisher Who Also Designed

The honest record is that Rick Loomis was not only, or even primarily, a prolific designer.

He was a publisher.

Flying Buffalo published Tunnels & Trolls, designed by Ken St. Andre. It published Nuclear War, designed by Doug Malewicki. It supported Ace of Aces and other titles by Alfred Leonardi. It gave Michael Stackpole, Liz Danforth, Steve Crompton, Larry DiTillio, and other major talents a place to work, publish, edit, draw, write, and experiment.

That complicates the attribution.

Loomis’s name is on important designs, but much of his historical importance comes from the company he built and the people he enabled. Flying Buffalo was a small publisher, but it had an outsized role in early RPG culture, play-by-mail gaming, solo adventures, system-neutral supplements, and the scrappy business of keeping weird games alive.

Loomis had a gift for infrastructure.

He made the systems that let other people’s designs move.

That is less visible than a signature mechanic. It is also harder to replace.

The Talent Incubator

Flying Buffalo was small enough that personality mattered.

A large company can hide its culture inside departments. A small company cannot. If the owner is paranoid, everyone feels it. If the owner is generous, that becomes part of the work.

The people around Loomis remembered him as the generous version.

Designers, artists, editors, and publishers who passed through Flying Buffalo went on to shape large parts of tabletop gaming. Ken St. Andre’s Tunnels & Trolls became the first major alternative fantasy RPG to Dungeons & Dragons. Michael Stackpole became a major game writer and novelist. Liz Danforth became one of the great artists and creative voices of the early RPG field. Larry DiTillio edited CityBook I before writing major work elsewhere, including Masks of Nyarlathotep for Call of Cthulhu.

Mentorship does not always show up in a credits list.

Still, it matters.

Four Hall of Fame-level careers touching one small Arizona company is not random noise. It says something about the room Loomis built.

He did not need every idea to be his.

He needed the work to exist.

Gama And The Business Of Gaming

Loomis also helped build the trade infrastructure around the hobby.

He co-founded the Association of Game Manufacturers, later known as the Game Manufacturers Association, and served as its first president and treasurer. He served the organization repeatedly over the years and remained closely associated with it for the rest of his life.

This is another plumbing contribution.

Trade associations do not look exciting from the outside. They handle booths, standards, communication, convention relationships, business disputes, and the repeated practical work of making an industry act like an industry.

Loomis understood that games needed more than designers.

They needed publishers who could survive.

They needed conventions where buyers and sellers could meet.

They needed enough shared infrastructure that small companies were not reinventing everything alone.

That work sits outside the normal boundaries of game design. It also made more game design possible.

The Honest Assessment

Rick Loomis is difficult to summarize because his greatest contributions often live one layer underneath design.

He built formats.

He built access.

He built a company that published other people’s best work.

He built trade infrastructure.

His personal design catalog is not huge. Starweb is the masterwork. Buffalo Castle is the historical first. Nuclear Destruction launched the business model. The Nuclear War expansions sustained a satirical card-game line. Grimtooth’s Traps and CityBook show his publishing instincts more than solo mechanical authorship.

That is the shape of the career.

Not the most prolific designer.

Not the cleanest mechanical theorist.

One of the people who made it possible for the hobby to grow pipes, wires, addresses, turn sheets, catalogs, conventions, and companies.

The credited designs tell one story.

The legacy is bigger than the credits.

The Hidden Pattern

Rick Loomis solved access problems.

That is the thread.

Can people play if they live in different cities? Yes. Use mail and computer moderation.

Can one person play an RPG alone? Yes. Build a solo adventure.

Can a supplement serve more than one rules system? Yes. Write it for the game master instead of the stat block.

Can small publishers survive in the same industry as bigger companies? Maybe. Build associations, conventions, catalogs, and relationships.

This is why "plumbing" is not an insult.

Plumbing is what lets the water move.

A field can have brilliant designers and still fail if there is no way for players to find the games, no way for distant players to connect, no way for small publishers to cooperate, no way for a lone player to start.

Loomis kept solving the unglamorous problem.

How do we get the game to the person who wants to play it?

What Remains

Starweb still stands as one of the defining play-by-mail designs.

Buffalo Castle still marks the moment the RPG became playable alone.

Grimtooth’s Traps still teaches game masters that the room is probably dangerous and the door may be worse.

Flying Buffalo still occupies a permanent place in tabletop history because it published, supported, and protected strange forms before the market knew what to do with them.

GAMA’s service award now carries Loomis’s name. That feels right. Service was the pattern. Not passive service. Not background politeness. Active service: building the thing everyone else needed but nobody else had built yet.

Rick Loomis died in 2019. The formats he opened did not close.

The games he designed still run. The forms he opened still work. The water still moves through the pipes.